Feb 11, 2012

GET STUPID ON THE SMARTNESS

Egisto Macchi

I Futurbili LP

1972/2012

Omni Recording Corporation/Roundtable reissue

Something happened along the way and, some time after, I realized (yupper) I am not the star of a movie of my life which is currently and constantly in production. Nor is music the soundtrack therefore, and thank fuck for that. Nah, the wonder of music for me lies in the other--as in, What is he/she really thinking? Sure, most such inquiries are finna fizzle out in irresolvable split ends and dandruff, but it's worth the ride anyhow. I mean, there's the road, after all.

Which leads me--however dyslexic the dotted trail--to the soundtrack album itself. Divorced from the image, (the sensory experience from which it requires, by nature, a dialogue), what's left is something like quarks bumping their toes on coffee tables in the stinking darkness. In udder woids, it matters not, and that's, ideally, where the fun comes in. Macchi, ya know having flitted about with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza with Morricone et al., surely knows a konk-out sesh when he sees it. And being somethin of a percussionist at heart, he also understands the power, threat, and goofiness of the "event," and its reliance on the preceding calm or quiet. So, yes, lots of quark toes light up, throb, and tingle as they do on all the classic zoner scores, being themselves a series of wonderful, seemingly miraculous collisions of moods, modes, and mud. And one can link Macchi's fuzz guitar slumming and musique concrete pretentions to all sortsa B-movie slosh and Radiophonic tool sheds, of course. I Futuribili is not one of his soundtracks per se, but I, and most of us in the non-academic side of the world, might've suspected otherwise--mainly because I like it. Who among us can say we toss Ligeti on the platter without thinking of Keir Dullea's freeze framed devastation at the unfurling of Jupiter's ozone face-trip? We're not immune, I admit. "The second image," does have something of a glow about it.

Surely, there's a prohibitive, enthusiast-only quality to records like this, too, but...hell, we're allowed to be curious, ain't we? And what's life without a few truly lost afternoons? A ream of interludes between pillows.